The words finally came!

As I write this, I’m still out of breath; and quite desirably so. Every time I push those last couple of pedals to the top of the hill overlooking the northern part of campus, I suck the sweet Indian air deeply into my stomach, and with it a feverish desire to run and write down every sensation the bicycle took me through on a single journey to and from class.

This morning: waking up to the call of worship and stepping out onto the balcony before breakfast to stretch and enjoy the music from a construction worker’s radio; it’s probably outdated and overplayed, but it’s new and interesting to my ear, so it doesn’t matter. After breakfast, I pick out mine from a line of bikes resting in the red sand and my tires clumsily slip through it as I leave the hostel.

The journey through campus is like driving through an entire community. Taking a left after leaving the hostel leads to an entire village of makeshift tarp-covered tents in the shade of trees and lines of laundry hung out to dry. But it doesn’t look like clothing—the pieces are in every color, as if the aesthetic value of one’s clothesline indicates the wealth or happiness of a family.

But today I take a right. I pass children playing with water hoses by the side of the road and am almost run over by a family on a tractor carrying a full load of green grasses for their cattle, which rest wherever they please. I pass by groups of dark women with long braided hair and brilliantly colored saris, carrying shiny metal pots on their heads in shallow wooden carriers. They smell of spicy Indian soaps, fresh and sweet and reminiscent of everything else here. They stare at me but give genuine grins if I’m brave enough to flash my own. Zooming by me are fathers on scooters who’ve managed to take multiple daughters and sons in little school uniforms to class in one trip. (There is an elementary school on campus as well.) Further down the road I glance to my left and see a monkey running along side me; to my right, an old bent man with a long white beard, dressed in indistinguishable pieces slowly makes his barefooted way to…? I pass by groups of young men meeting at the canteen for breakfast, sporting their tight jeans, leaning on each other’s shoulders and drinking tiny cups of insanely sugared coffee.

Professors and students and employees and their families and monkeys and peacocks and stray dogs all have a bed here. The culture is community; suggesting the cyclical nature of Indian culture pervades scholarship and keeps the two connected; strange. What a foreign idea, and what a strange world!